Notes / Commercial Description:
Smooth Sleeman Honey Brown Lager is brewed in the tradition of cottage breweries at the turn of the century. Some might think the tradition is outdated; we just think we got it right the first time.

Reviews by trevorwideman:

The colour of Iced Tea, pours with a medium fizzy head and looks like a soft drink with the bubbles sticking to the glass a bit. Goes flat pretty quick though. Smell is very much roasted and malty, quite sweet. I'm sure a lot of people are drawn to this beer because "Honey Brown" sounds "different".

Taste is very much as predicted, some roasted malts and a cloying caramel sweetness. There's a bit of hop bitterness in the back though. Not complex at all, mouthfeel is a bit bitey. Still though, I find the sweetness a bit too much, and the beer comes off as rather unbalanced toward the toothache-inducing. Some bitterness would have been very welcome. Drinkable, but boring and average to be sure.

473ml can. The beer pours a light amber color with with a white head. The aroma is heavy on the toffee without too much else. The flavor is toffee with a light amount of bitterness and flavor from some grassy hops. Still, this is a very malt-forward beer, Medium mouthfeel and medium carbonation.

Running low on cold beer in the house, and the Thanksgiving weekend totally destroyed the stocks at my local liquor store. This was an old high-school favourite of mine, and it was one of the few cold six packs left. So there you go.

Poured into a little Hoegaarden bucket. The very definition of amber, with a sticky 1/2 inch head that dissolves into a little ring.

Nose is sweet and one dimensional, no hops or grain to speak of. Just...honey brown. Maybe a bit of molasses or brown sugar.

Tastes about the same. Overly sweet, not the faintest trace of hops or anything interesting, as if the brewmaster forgot to add them in the brewing process. Finish is just diminished sweetness. Thin bodied, sharp cola carbonation.

Now, having said all this, I don't tend to mind sweetness as a general rule, and I would probably drink this instead of a lot of macro Euro lagers. Also, I'm about 20 minutes from the brewery, so this is a brew that tends to show up a lot at parties, so it's in my best interest to cultivate a taste for it. Fortunately, I rarely get stuck in this situation, and when I do, I drink it as cold as possible straight from the bottle.

Clear pale brown color, billowy head that stays at 1/2 inch for a while. Caramel aroma, a little hay smell. Light and sweet, a little buttery with minimum hop impact. Could really use some more overall oomph, its watery enough to be pretty much done by the back of the mouth. A little impression of overcooked celery. Drinkable, I suppose, its a little more subtle than some honey brews in heavy sweetness.

355ml can. For what seems like forever and a day, this beer has been my go-to when faced with nothing but the big boys on tap at the finer establishments around town who show PPV Oiler games. Now it's go-time in inland BC, after a day on the slopes.

This beer pours a crystal clear, medium copper-amber hue, with two fingers of loosely foamy, bubbly, and surprisingly creamy dirty white head, which leaves some broad strokes of uneven coral reef lace around the glass as it quickly recedes.

It smells of sweet grainy pale malt, caramelized rice, a bit of heather honey, and mildly astringent plastic. The taste starts with a slight floral hoppiness, followed by an almost overwrought tinged caramel malt sweetness, emboldened by some extra dextrin or other cheap sugars, a straightforward, plain-ass honey sweetness, and some lightly sour notes - hop or lingering graininess-borne, it's hard to say.

It's a little high on the carbonation side, though mostly just frothy, the body an adequate medium weight, buoyed as it is by the murky sugars, and generally smooth. It finishes rather sweet, the generic honey and touched caramel malt providing all one needs to know here.

A more or less innocuous, everyman example of the 'honey' beer phenomenon in Canada and parts farther removed. It's easy to put back a few of these, sure, but at some point one becomes aware of this particular sort of acquiescence to blandly-made universal offerings.

I've had this before - it comes in stylin' clear glass bottle with raised images of Canadian paraphanelia - beavers and maple leaves and all that. It didn't really have a head, the color was golden-brown. The smell was faintly like sweet malt but it's very faint. The taste isn't much of anything actually - just light and tasteless. It's not my first Sleeman's choice - I'd probably choose their Cream Ale over this one.

Sleeman&#8217;s Honey Brown Lager: nice enough looking brew. Deep amber, but not much head, and what there was tended to disappear quickly. The aroma was almost absent, as far as I could tell. Each of the Sleeman beers I&#8217;ve had are fairly unremarkable as far as taste goes, they seem to be very bland. No off tastes, no skunk, but not bad, but not good.

This one is surprise, surprise, and surprise! Bland. It has a standard lager taste, and what honey it has is notable only in the smoothness it imparts to the mouthfeel, and a hint in the aftertaste.